FREEDOM

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately. What does freedom really mean? Does it mean different things to different people? Can there be any one definition of the word?

235 years ago, freedom meant that a group of British colonies, suffering under enormous tax burdens and the tyranny of a far away King, wished to chart their own course. They wished to break away from their mother country, the country in which many of them were born, and to live as a new, independent nation. Benjamin Franklin spoke of how we had already become a new nationality – we needed a new nation. He was talking about change. Evolving needs for an evolving people.

Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant Declaration of Independence became a shell of its original form as compromises and changes were made to the document. Certainly the greatest of these changes was the institution of slavery. The entire economy of the Southern colonies was based on this unspeakable institution. Indeed, without the removal of the abolition clause, it is most probable that Independence would not have come into being. It would take nearly another hundred years, and a bloody civil war for this horror to be abolished. And it would take all the way into the Twentieth Century until civil rights legislation passed Congress and was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.

But this new nation was still not much more than an idea. White, male, land-holders were full citizens. Africans and women were property. There was still a revolutionary war to be fought and won, and win it we did, against seemingly impossible odds. Now we had our new nation – and nobody seemed to be able to agree on what sort of nation it ought to be.

The United Colonies evolved into the United States. Wise men evolved their thinking to include Africans and finally even women as full citizens. We expanded westward and fulfilled our manifest destiny. And we decimated an indigenous population along the way. Towns and cities began to spring up. A railroad stretched from one end of the continent to the other. The industrial revolution drove a growing economy. And we went to war again. And again, and again, and again.

Today, we face a new kind of war. A war based on the corruption of religion. A war which would catapult women back into the Nineteenth Century; A war which has shut down access to basic reproductive care in several states. A war which would define marriage in the most narrow of terms. This war seeks to deny science and the discovery of new medicines and new treatments for devastating diseases. This is a movement which is turning back time; turning back our nation to a time before Evolution was proven to be a fact. Turning back time to a point where religion was not separate from the State. Where the personal, religious beliefs of a bunch of white, land-owning males are the basis for deciding what is best for everyone. Where civil rights are trampled in the name of “security.” Our every movement is caught on camera; our every keystroke recorded for posterity. And why? Because “our God” is better than “their God.” Our shiny new nation, filled with such hope for the future and yet tarnished by such corruption, is evolving once again. This time, it appears to be evolving backwards.

But I see a glimmer of hope over the horizon. I see New York State, the site of our nation’s first capitol, standing once again as a beacon of equality. I see people taking to the streets to protest rights which are being stripped away from them. And I hear a voice, way in the back of the crowd, saying “But I’m not really free. I’m not really an equal citizen. That’s wrong, and that has to change.” What is freedom, America? To me, it means respect for every human being, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. It means compassion for those in despair, both in our own nation and around the world. It means no longer denying oppression and despotism when it occurs around the world. Freedom means choice. Freedom means that the State doesn’t get to tell me what I can and cannot do with my own body, or who I can or cannot marry. It means being able to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July in public with my newly engaged gay friends. It means to me what it meant to John Adams; “All Americans, free forevermore.”




What does freedom mean to you?